Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Dr. Dawg is chilling.The Harper goons, with the support of the RCMP has created lists of political dissidents. Young voters now find themselves on lists and banned from Harper events for such crimes against the party as visiting Cancun on behalf of a well established mainstream environmental NGO. Lists, based on suspicion of activity that runs counter to the ideology of the Conservative Party.

This party of Harper can very likely now be said to have in conjunction with the RCMP, compiled files with details on the lives of Canadians it does not like without their knowledge. Are these records in possession of the RCMP? And if so, under what law or condition?

Or does someone like Dmitri Soudas have a copy on his hard-drive? The incest between the state police and a specific political party demands further investigation. But by whom? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

6 comments:

I'd say I'm surprised, except I am not. It is entirely consistent with everything I've said about Harper and who he models himself and his campaign tools from since before he became PM. To be honest, I'd always assumed he and his party were amassing such files, the only thing that does surprise me is how open they have been in acknowledging it in this campaign. There is a reason why I have been willing to agree with the comparisons to Hitler in the early to mid 30s in Germany with the way the Harper regime operates, this is just the latest point of similarity (when one considers the difference in information tech involved of course) between how the two resemble each other. There does tend to be an unfortunate repeating pattern in how far right extremists and the best known fascist of the 20th century operate, which should be sending up massive warning signals to anyone that understands the importance of how history repeats itself to those that refuse to learn from it!

I know this will seem over the top and/or harsh to some, and I can understand it, especially how often so many people use Hitler comparisons so easily and freely. I am not one of those though, and I am using it here because it does fit, it fits in a very disturbing degree of commonality and not in isolation either, the similarities between him and Harper in how they operated their governments (before Hitler became the de facto dictator of Germany of course, I am after all talking about the first few years prior to the night of broken glass (sorry, I suck at remembering how to spell it in the original German).

You think the last 5 years in a minority have been bad, it is nothing compared to even one term as a majority (also something I have said repeatedly since before he became PM) under the Harper regime. One of the reasons I have been so contemptuous of the NDP under Layton since they took down Martin was because it risked this and what Harper was after and capable of was already well known to those of us that are political junkies. ANYONE willing to risk even one majority term of Harper for any reason is in my books (when they have to know just how dangerous that would be) is someone I cannot help but be contemptuous of. I mean really, if I a mid 40s disabled man in Halifax can see all of this coming, shouldn't those that actually make their livings in politics be at least as able to??? I may have a healthy sense of self confidence about my ability to follow and understand politics but unlike our PM I am not someone that thinks I am brighter than just about anyone else, no I have nowhere near that level of arrogance.

We live in dangerous times for this nation, and this election is the very last chance we have of salvaging what we can from the already massive fiscal, social and infrastructure (both physical and institutional) damage done by the Harper regime with its minority, and one thing I am certain of, as bad as things look to us that follow closely the reality is still worse because I really don't think we have seen some of the worst of what has truly been going on under the guise of government secrecy.

Scotian, your perspective is not at all over the top for me. I too despaired when so many were willing to let Harper inch his toe into power just to punish the Liberals.

On the micro level, I am more left than the NDP and I never liked the fact that Martin pushed the LPC so far to the right. But, BUT, when Harper was given his golden ticket to establish some legitimacy to his party with AdScam, I despaired. As bad as Martin was, Harper has been destructive. He has already managed to move the goal posts way to the right with barely a whimper from the opposition parties. If he gets a majority, the GW Bush administration will look like a picnic in comparison.

My mom grew up in Germany during WWII (her father was a military officer who served in both wars, although her family helped some Jews get out in the early days). Her comment about Harper (paraphrased): "When I look at him, I see a typical enthusiastic Nazi Party member." Not a camp commandant, just a Nazi.

EXACTLY! What is worse though is that the Harper regime has set some absolutely dangerous precedents in the weakening of our core democratic institutions from the independence of regulators and crown agencies to removal of programs like the court challenges program to the way he asserted (and thankfully was blocked by Speaker Millikan) that he and his minority government was superior in authority to Parliament itself which is a complete reversal of how our system actually operates to the contempt grounds that brought down the government and triggered this election.

I said back then that a government with a history of money scandals is far less dangerous and destructive to our democracy than a government that will be full of abuse of power scandals as was going to come with a Harper government given his views on how power is supposed to work in this country as opposed to how it actually does. After all, governments that have such money scandals are alas typical in our history going right back to the nation's first under Macdonald, but those that are focused on abuse of power have not been typical of our history, not at all, which is yet another reason why Harper is so uniquely dangerous. Indeed, starting from his first day in office he has been committing all kinds of unprecedented actions starting with the buying of Emerson into his cabinet right out of an election, something unheard of until then.

I watched this train wreck coming for years, tried warning people of it and for it got treated with all the respect of Cassandra (if I was lucky to even get that much civility) for it. It has been so emotionally painful for me to watch the Harper regime in action that it caused significant medical issues for me, namely cardiac arrythmias because of how stressful I found it to watch a sitting PM pervert and destroy so much of what I cherished about our core way of life that for the last two years I have had to take a very hands off approach to commenting/blogging about what I was seeing. This is no exaggeration either, this is simple reality, because I grew up with the old fashioned belief that to be a good citizen required that I understand not just the political issues and policies of the day but also the fundamental structures by which our government actually is designed to operate as. I know that is not the norm these days nor has been for a long time now, but it was how I was raised.

Unlike you I under the traditional (as in pre-Harper) understanding of our political spectrum I am a swing centrist voter. I don't tend to trust any ideological perspective beyond the realm of theory/academia no matter what side or perspective it comes from and zealotry/fanaticism/extremism is something I always views with intense distrust because it always carries with it massive blinders unable to see beyond it's central core. On social views I probably stack up to being similar to you, but on economic views I suspect I don't, but overall I don't really care about the origin of ideas so long as they work and respect human dignity, which is one of the reasons why for all their faults the Libs get a certain amount of respect from me even now, because they have been willing to take from all sides ideas which actually can work instead of rejecting them out of ideological purity (something the Harper regime illustrates far better than any prior government in our history).

That said, for the past seven years my sole focus has been to stop Harper and failing that to remove him as soon as possible from the political context because he and his ways are far more corrosive to our core democracy than anything we have ever seen before. As I have been saying consistently since I first started blogging.